ALEX BRUMMER: High profile cases testing the mettle of the Serious Fraud Office

The caseload of the Serious Fraud Office is starting to look extraordinarily heavy. The 2010 Bribery Act has given it big guns to turn on some of Britain’s most famed manufacturers, notably Rolls-Royce and now GlaxoSmithKline.

David Green QC, who inherited a badly damaged SFO two years ago, is in need of some successes. It is a pity that two of the FTSE’s most valued stars find themselves in the limelight.

Second front: SFO director David Green is also tasked with throwing the book at bad bankers

All of this is particularly embarrassing for GSK boss Sir Andrew Witty, an adviser to the Cameron Government, who two years ago promised to clean up the company after paying a £2billion fine in the United States for making illicit payments to doctors. He pledged to end ‘unacceptable mistakes’.

Since then China has moved against Mark Reilly, the former boss of GSK’s China business.

Other allegations against GSK have also emerged including charges of making corrupt payments to medics in Poland, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.

On a second front, Green is tasked with throwing the book at bad bankers. Until now prosecutors have had limited success except in Ireland and Iceland. But now the SFO is engaged in several sets of investigations against the bankers.

A dozen former executives of Barclays are being or are to be interviewed under caution over alleged commissions paid to Qatari officials at the time of the bank’s emergency fund raisings in autumn 2008, when it escaped being taken into public ownership.

The SFO is also among the lead prosecutors handling cases arising from the rigging of the Libor interest rate. Those being pursued in the courts include three former employees of the money broker Icap.

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Three ex-Barclays traders, all Americans, also have appeared in court in London charged with having ‘conspired together with other persons to defraud Barclays plc and its associates’.

The SFO does not have the easiest time bringing prosecutions. When it comes to big corporates and banks, the scales of justice do at times seem to be weighed against it. Access of defendants to ‘magic circle’ City law firms, who get to conduct the first interviews, means the territory is well trodden by the time the SFO gets to them.

The appallingly slow pace of UK financial justice – the Barclays three Libor offences date back to 2005-07 – also counts against it.

Finally, if and when cases do come to trial, the detail of the offences can be so complicated and the trials so lengthy that juries are both befuddled and vulnerable to defections for health and other reasons.

All of this will make it more attractive for Green to seek co-operation deals with the big corporations involved in bribery claims so as to secure more efficient justice.

In the case of the bankers the public mood is bitter and the desire to see people go on trial extraordinarily strong. Making bankers pay is part of the long healing process from the catastrophic behaviour of the recent past. The SFO has faced many tests in the past but is regarded as having come up wanting.

It needs to put the Private Eye image of the Serious Farce Office to bed once and for all.

Abuse upheld

City justice can triumph even if the process is sclerotic. The efforts by former JP Morgan Cazenove rainmaker Ian Hannam to escape two charges of market abuse has failed at the Upper Tribunal following hearings that took place in July and October 2013.

Hannam was fined £450,000 in 2012 by the Financial Services Authority for improperly providing privileged information on Heritage Oil in two emails dispatched to the Kurdish oil minister Ashti Hawrami in 2008.

In itself Hannam’s behaviour may not count among the most heinous of market abuses. But it will require investment bankers and brokers to be far more cautious in the future before divulging information to third parties. The regulator is likely to demand a full paper trail of any such communications.

The irony is that Hannam’s greatest failing at JP Morgan Cazenove was bringing the Indonesian coal group Bumi to the London market, causing enormous anguish for investors when assets vanished in a puff of smoke and the share price plummeted.

We all make mistakes but some are bigger than others.

Fancy assortment

New frontiers are on the horizon for the world’s great chocolate brands.

In Malaysia Cadbury has been caught polluting its hazelnut and roast almond bars after pig DNA was discovered.

Meanwhile, Swiss chocolatier Nestle is expanding into the skin filler business with a £834m deal to buy anti-ageing facial injections from Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

What next? Ferrero to expand into silver polish and Hershey to sell soap?